


root & branch

by pyrites



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (technically?), Canon Compliant, Childhood Friend in Backstory, Flashbacks, Gen, Gerry Beats Up A Tree, Gerry Gets His Ass Kicked By A Tree, Gerry Gets Rescued From A Tree, Gerry has FRIENDS and ALLIES and SUPPORT and - this is crucial - DADS., Missing Scene, Original Characters - Freeform, Pre-Canon, Rescue, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Teamwork, The Buried - Freeform, The Corruption - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrites/pseuds/pyrites
Summary: “Can I light it on fire?”“Sure. It’ll just try and stop you.”Gerard Keay, as a rule, works alone. The Dread Powers do not. What feeds one feeds another, and sometimes, fighting fire with fire means contradicting yourself.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Original Character(s)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 88
Collections: GerryTitan verse





	root & branch

**Author's Note:**

> this is more or less a statement from gerry's point of view! and it was done in collaboration with rook @[corvidventures](https://corvidventures.tumblr.com/), whose art is in the end notes (because spoilers!) bonus art from others, too!
> 
> let's hit it!

━━━━━━━━━▼━━━━━━━━━

There are two sick girls in the hospital. No diagnosis yet. No photos, no names, no story. Just the suspense of inconclusivity, and a warning to stay away from the old coal breaker by the river.

He can’t ask them what they saw. Getting clearance into the hospital would be more difficult than going straight to the source, even half-sunken in floodland. If two teenage girls could break into an abandoned industrial building, so could he, never mind the new red tape put in place by their adventurism. Nevermind what they must have gone through for someone to realize this place was so dangerous, that he might very well need to go through the same thing to find the answer — what matters is putting an end to it.

Maybe they’ll be released. Maybe it’ll save them, too.

It’s been tented off for a week now. No results on the news. No clearance for anyone without a hazmat suit. The furthest Gerard can get himself is the edge of a plastic fence, garish orange in the boggy green of the false marsh. The river is still swollen with old rain. The mud is thick and miserable. 

He can smell something wrong with the air. It sticks in the back of his throat with every slow breath he takes in through his nose, a phantom prophecy too far away to hurt him just yet. Can’t cross the mesh fence without a gas mask. A bad fall cracked the last one, and his jaw along with it. There’s probably a hardware store nearby enough that he can get one by tonight. 

Didn’t come entirely unprepared. Gerard rubs a latex glove between his fingertips inside his pocket as he walks carefully through the brush, focus trailing the very edge of the fence for signs of oversight. Overgrowth undetected by ordinary people with ordinary eyes and no real clue of what to look for.

Just a leaf. A little, yellow leaf sprouting up from the edge of the fence, newborn and learning. Gerard crouches down beside it slowly, careful to keep his balance and tuck the length of his jacket behind his knees. It’s good protection in the thicket, but he doesn’t want it trailing muck. Gloves on, he reaches out.

When the sprout gives a violent shiver, he rips his hand back.

Through the holes in the fence, Gerard watches as the sickly motion ripples backwards through the brush; it’s like the disturbance of an animal running through tall grass, except it’s all yellow leaves in various stages of growth, shuddering in disgust at being touched.

All connected.

There is a mess of plastic-wrapped people filing around the tent, chattering with each other and moving supplies around. Testing, no doubt. Wasting time. Gerard zeroes in on the group of three nearest to the entry point they’d left open in the fence for themselves in the presumed absence of trespassers. One of them spots him and taps another on the shoulder, pointing. 

Gerard keeps walking ahead, met in the middle with hurried accusation. If this were happening anywhere closer to the city, the man might be in a suit. He looks uncomfortable in his rubber boots as he squelches forward through the yielding riversilt.

Gerard knows better than to ask questions in the hope of a straightforward answer. He asks so he can pick apart the lie.

“What have you found?” 

The man pulls a face, affronted. “This is a restricted area, you need to _leave.”_

“How big is it on the inside?” Gerard asks, turning his head back towards the tent. “You need to account more for the roots than the leaves. They go deeper than what you’ve boxed in.”

“You can’t _be_ here.” The man steps forward again, reaching. Gerard angles his elbow away and watches his hand fall through the air only to clench into a fist. “Can’t you read the signs?”

**_DANGER_ ** __  
_MICROBIAL HAZARD_ _  
_ _KEEP OUT_

Gerard rolls his eyes. 

“You’ll have to kill it fast. Longer you wait, stronger it gets. It’s still spreading out from under the tent.” He nods to the direction he’d come from, looks back to the man in time to witness his horror. “Let me guess. It wasn’t that far out this morning?”

For a moment, dread overtakes warning. “No, it—” The moment passes for panic. “Look, son, this isn’t the time for pranks and daredevilry, this is _serious.”_

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Gerard nods to the people cycling around the tent. “You’re not going to find record of it anywhere. Better to just rip it up and torch the whole thing so no one else gets hurt. That includes you.”

“I won’t tell you again,” the man argues. _“Get out of here,_ before I have someone remove you.”

Urgency. If the man were truly angry, trigger happy, he’d have kicked right off with security. Tried harder to manhandle him out, yell at him on the way back up the bank. 

That’s pleading in his eyes. Worry. 

In some ways, it’s exactly what Gerard had been expecting. This at least means the people here care about the public more than the discovery, the patent. This man doesn’t want civilians to get hurt. Gerard is thankful for it, even if he’s beyond being particularly moved. 

Because it’s funny, sometimes, being assigned the role of ‘civilian.’ They never know just how much ground experience outmeasures a degree, or legality, or a gun.

“Benedict,” someone else says, walking up behind the man to lay a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll handle this. You send someone over to the perimeter.”

Benedict glances between his coworker and Gerard with clear discontent, but steps back without another word. Gerard turns his focus to the new guy; taller than he is, wide around the middle, horn-rimmed glasses. No marks, yet, but there’s a threat of one right behind him.

“Walk with me,” the man says, and Gerard lets this one take his elbow. Lets him walk him back towards the edge of the wood, leaning close and checking over his shoulder like he’s waiting for the right moment to ask a dangerous question.

That’s good. That’s useful.

When there’s enough distance between the tent and their conversation, the man spins around to face him. “What do you know about this?”

Gerard looks over his shoulder at the river. “Tell me what you think you know first.”

The man straightens up. “…Aspen clones. It’s all one root system, one being. But it can’t be real aspen, not if it’s—”

“Poison?”

“They love acidic soil, but it’s too wet here. There’s  _ no sun _ in that building, but it’s… it’s growing too fast, it’s  _ spilling  _ out of the doors and windows, we— we haven’t been able to get in.”

“You shouldn’t go in unless you have a plan.”

“We can’t make a plan until we know what it really is.” The man turns to glance at the tent, and back again. “That’s the problem. The way testing is going, I don’t know if we ever will. Nothing reads like it should, the indicators turn the wrong colours, c-colours that— that they shouldn’t be _able_ to _turn,_ it’s all _wrong.”_

A lot to disclose to an unqualified stranger. Desperation.

Gerard approaches authority with the intention of being dismissed. The way he’s spoken to usually declares exactly what the real problem is. Usually, he digs his heels in. The look on this man’s face tells him that he won’t need to this time. His eyes are shifting. His mouth is grim.

Gerard smiles. “Protocol to the wind, huh?”

Bitterness. “Protocol’s not getting us anywhere.”

“I can see that, if you’re this quick to talk to me about it.”

Resolute. “You don’t look like some punk kid sneaking around. You look like you’re gathering information. Like you’ve seen this before.”

“Have, yeah,” Gerard confirms. “Maybe not haunted aspen, but the Filth doesn’t crawl far from itself.” He scoffs. “I want to help you kill it.”

Doubt, just a flash. A flicker in understanding, forced away with a hard blink. “At this point, I’ll take any help I can get. My superiors don’t like this, either, but they’re— this is different. I don’t think we can handle it by the book.”

“No,” Gerard says. “You can’t.”

Straight spine, shoulders squared. Gerard appreciates the darkness in his expression. 

“Right,” he says. “I shouldn’t be so cavalier, but… I have a bad feeling. The kids who got sick— I have girls that age, too. I can’t see this happen to anyone else. I have to be able to go home to them and not bring this with me.”

Gerard nods. That’s good. That’s the sort of reason that will get him through this. 

He’s not about to argue a man’s willingness to bend and break his orders in the name of saving. He won’t take someone else’s gut instinct for granted when it’s the same instinct that drove him to come here himself. He won’t question the skipping of steps; the decision was made before he got here, and Gerard doesn’t want to know what kind of try or die shit some random ECDC worker might have gone for on his own. He doesn’t trust the government as far as he can throw the queen, but there is a reason he hasn’t lost all faith in people yet.

“What’s your name?”

The man lifts a hand like he’s about to readjust his glasses before he remembers he’s wearing a shield over his face. “Seymour. You?”

“Gerard.” 

“Gerard,” Seymour repeats. No offered hand for a shake. “How can I reach you later?”

There are no such thing as business cards in a business like this, but Gerard carries a notepad and a pen in his deepest jacket pocket. His mobile number is scribbled on the bottom of the page and torn off, passed into a thick rubber glove.

Gerard doesn’t like involving civilians, but civilians like Seymour have connections.

Seymour has a brother in the fire department, access to hazmat suits and bone mics. He has clearance into the tent and a way to clear out the riverside, because he knows the people in charge of surveillance. He has a willingness to break the rules for the greater good. As far as Gerard is concerned — for the time being, at least — Seymour is not a civilian anymore.

━━━━━━━━━▼━━━━━━━━━

When they said the fir tree found growing in a Russian botanist’s lung was a medical hoax, they were not seeing the entire picture.

The sick girls inhaled seedlings. Waiting two days to act felt like murder, but they needed time. Supplies. A plan.

Hector, Jack and Arlo have each spent more than one shift as nighttime security over the past ten days. All three of them have stories that could curl Gerard’s hair if he hadn’t heard them all before. Kendra hadn’t heard any until they were all sitting around Verity’s dining room table, all too consumed with turmoil over beakers boiling over, soil going wrong in the petri. By the time the night was through, she’d torn through two cans of the beer that Rudy had brought along with him in part because he knew he would need one for himself. Seymour didn’t so much as glance at the 12-pack any longer than Gerard did, the both of them seated at opposite ends of the table with their arms crossed for most of the night, overseeing. 

Seymour looks at his people the way that Gerard looks at everyone he meets. It’s good. He’ll take care of them when this is all over.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Kendra questions under her breath. She only needs one hand to haul a can of gasoline out of the trunk of Hector’s car.

Gerard needs both hands. “It’ll have to. Not much else is going to do it.”

“You said that, yeah. I’m just… I’m still thinking about the roots. If even one bit of this thing is left behind, even after we burn the rest, won’t it just grow again?”

“We’ll get it all,” he tells her. “There’s enough of us.”

_“Can I light it on fire?”_

_“Sure. It’ll just try and_ _stop you.”_

_Mary Keay isn’t the only one in this business with a child. Gerard is not the only one in chains. He spent enough time sitting at the kiddy rune circle with Tazia to know that she is nothing like her parents. He remembers walking through her garden. She positioned herself between him and writhing thorns, a pair of loppers propped up on her shoulder._

_“You can use it to your advantage,” she told him over the phone, slowly so he could parse her Italian. “As long as you can find your way back out.”_

For all the weird shit Gerard gets himself into, he’s almost surprised to say it took him twenty-four years to put on a real hazmat suit.

The first thing he learns is that he can’t put it on by himself; no one can. Hector helps him secure his boots and gloves, Kendra steadies him by the harness. Seymour tightens the straps of his mask, tapes his hood down around it for him.

Gerard stands still for it. Lets Seymour clap him on the shoulder before turning to help Verity, and tries not to think suffocating thoughts. Instead, he thinks about the way Seymour’s eyes curve into a smile over his own mask, and remembers that he’s a father.

_The sickness responds to treatments for similar infections from plants and fungi, but it leaves leafy veinshapes pressing up through the skin. Verity stared at the photos as she showed them to Gerard, her jaw tight with fear._

_“Natural things_ can _work against this stuff. You just have to get there in time. Kill the core, it should save the kids.”_

_“Nothing works like that,” said Arlo._ “Nothing _works like that.”_

_“Well, maybe not all the way. But enough that they’ll live.”_

_“What’ll life be like if they do?” Verity asks the question to the photos. “What’ll they be living with?”_

Wagons and wheelbarrows would give them away if this thing was so sensitive to disturbance, but they needed more than one can of gasoline per person. Even with eight of them working together, the building is almost completely flooded with knotted, woody vines.

Their oxygen is limited. They only have twenty minutes.

_“So, we douse as much of it as we can—”_

_“—and you’ll do what, exactly?”_

_Gerard shrugged. “Drop a match in its mouth.”_

_A scoff from Rudy. “Assuming it has one.”_

_Gerard laughed at that._

_“Too easy,” said Hector. “What’s the catch?”_

_“No catch, for any of you. I’ll get to the heart of it.”_

_Weighty doubt in Seymour’s face. “Not alone, you won’t.”_

They all split up into teams — Jack and Kendra, Arlo and Verity, Rudy and Hector — and enter from different vantage points in the building. Gerard and Seymour take off for the center. The hands not hauling their wagons are armed with hatchets and mattocks, and in Gerard’s case, a forever match.

The open space is suffocated with jaundiced foliage, white trunks warped and twisting around each other in an insult to aspen’s elegance. Black spots in the bark watch them creep forward. Waiting. Gerard looks them in the eye as they pass.

Seymour treads carefully beside him. He’s saving his can of gasoline.

“All of this is really just… _one_ beast?”

Gerard can’t rely on nonverbal cues now. “Yes, and no.”

_“And this isn’t going to wake it?”_ Verity’s whisper fills his earpiece. Her voice is strained with effort. _“I feel like it— it_ knows _we’re in here, the leaves— they’re—”_

_“—curling,”_ Arlo finishes, when she fails to. _“I only poured a little, and they’re—”_

“Stay calm,” Gerard tells them. “Just get what you can, and get out.”

_“What about you?” asked Hector. “How are you going to get back out?”_

_Seymour spoke before Gerard could. “We’ll leave our path clear. If any of you end up close to the center by the time the fire starts, you can use the same route.”_

_Gerard couldn’t think of a better way, or a better person to have on his side._

The further they go, the less it feels like a building and the more it feels like a jungle. The less the trees look like aspen, and the more they look like another world.

“If anyone asks, tell them we were playing _Jumanji._ ”

Seymour laughs into his comm and he doesn’t sound like he’s about to cry. He doesn’t sound as afraid as Gerard would think a person ought to be. He doesn’t look so bad, either. Just nervous. Gerard gets it. He’s nervous, too.

He doesn’t know if this will work. He hopes it does. Fire usually saves him from things. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he got any of these people hurt. As long as he gets them out before the place goes down, that’ll be enough. 

_“Shouldn’t we all set a fire from where we are?”_

_“Not until I set mine. If you light up from the outside too soon, and if the central mass isn’t_ also _burning, it’s got a better chance of putting itself out and trapping us there.”_

_“We could count down to it,” Kendra said. “All the comms are connected.”_

_“I can’t risk anyone jumping the gun.”_

_“I think we can handle some three, two, one,” Jack defended._

_Gerard shook his head. “No one_ plans _a panic response.”_

_“…Ken, do those look like—”_

_“—People. That’s a bloody_ person, _that’s—”_

Gerard whips his head around to search through the trees. “What’s going on?”

_“There’s… a few of these trees, they’re—”_

Dammit. Of course. Gerard sighs, clutching his lighter in frustration.

“Douse them,” he instructs. “They’re too much a part of this now.”

_“‘Now?’”_ Jack repeats. _“Are you saying they were—?”_

“Yep. Those girls weren’t the first people to break in.”

_“Didn’t you say if we kill the thing, it would save the girls?”_ Verity’s voice. _“Why not these people, too?”_

“It’s too late for them, if they’ve been assimilated into the root system. If they get up when the rest does, you’ll need the leg up.”

Someone makes a queasy sound. Someone else swears. Gerard can’t stop himself from laughing when he catches a distant murmur of ‘treeople’ from Seymour.

_“You’re sick.”_ Rudy laughs, too. He sounds ill. _“G-d, this one looks like my mother-in-law.”_

_“How do we know it can mobilize?”_

_“We don’t,” Tazia said. “Not for sure. But if it reacted to touch the way you said, I think there’s a chance.”_

_Gerard switched the phone to his other ear. “So, we’re just playing chase.”_

_“I hope you’re not as clumsy running as you used to be.”_

_“I was twelve.”_

_“So was I.”_

_“You_ tripped _me.”_

_She laughed, high and clear. “And now you know to watch your ankles. These things won’t help you back up like I did.”_

It’s a mound of gnarled tangleroot, and it’s pulsating. Not just pulsating, but _breathing._ It’s wheezing and groaning and gurgling and alive and it’s been getting more and more pissed off by the minute and Seymour is finally horrified and Gerard knew it, he _knew_ it, he knew it was too persistent to just be a strain.

He throws his weight to lash it with gasoline, and it lifts its head from the snarls.

Something collides with his hip so hard that he fears a crack in the bone before he registers that he’s falling. He hits the roots hard. Seymour calls his name into the comms before the ground starts to shudder and move.

The noise is distorted through his hood, overlapping voices shouting in terror. Gerard feels the rock-split of cement cracking underneath him and he rolls, watching from the thatch of vine-tips as thick limbs uproot themselves from the ground. The scream is nauseous and mucousy, wet and too dry at the same time. A mass of wooden contortion turns towards them with tangible rage in an empty, featureless face. It stares with its every limb, every black eyespot on the trees bending impossibly to cave in around them like the falling bars of a closing cage.

_“Run!”_

Seymour runs to him first, dragging him up by the arm. He scrambles to find his supplies through the beam of light from his headlamp, the forever match fallen from his hand and the gas can leaking onto the wrong roots.

_“They’re moving!”_ Kendra shrieks. _“The— the treeople things, they’re—_ Jack!”

“Light them up!”

_“It’s_ on _him!”_

“Get it off of him and _then_ light it up!”

Sounds of struggle roll around in his ears. Seymour’s gas can bounces off the roots emptily when he drops it, its contents splashed all across the waking giant. Gerard strikes his forever match against the Ferro rod to summon a flame, and hurls it into the approaching mass. The snap of firebirth is drowned out by another scream as it claws forward through the cats-cradle, tearing itself down as it charges.

Seymour takes off running straight for the exit. Gerard turns a corner.

_“Gerard! What are you doing!?”_

“It’s not uprooted enough, just go!”

He hears the smack of collision behind him as it barrels into walls, ripping up the floor as it clambers after him. Climbing over the labyrinth of its own limbs. Burning, crying out.

The second time he falls is his own fault. The roots he’s running on are stationary, too extensively overgrown from the centric mass to even _need_ mobility to consume this place. Throwing his hands out in front of him to catch himself doesn’t stop his mask from smacking onto a raised knot of wet bark with blinding force. It takes a delirious second to realize that the choked noise echoing in the closed space of his hood came out of his own mouth.

Falling in a place like this is what Tazia tripped him to teach him out of. Gerard remembers the crunch of lopper blades closing around a vine that snagged his foot, the drowning look in her eyes when she realized how angry her mother would be that she cut it. 

Tazia may not be entombed, but she is an essential part of that garden to this day. She is trapped by her vow to keep it contained, to keep it from becoming overgrown like this place. This place isn’t overseen by someone so enduring.

Falling in a place like this means that Gerard can’t even emulate her. He’ll just die in it.

These guys value their families enough to run for themselves. He doesn’t blame them. It’s what he told them to do at the table. 

The ground drops away from under him. Gerard struggles against the feeling of pressure around his arms before he realizes that they’re being slung over shoulders, a person on either side of him. Distantly, it registers that he can’t hear the creature. No heat on his back.

“Where’s Seymour?” He slaps a hand down over his mask where the microphone is affixed inside. _“Seymour!”_

_“Keep going, I’m fine!”_

“What the hell are you doing?”

_“I’ve got it right here!”_ Rapid, heavy breath, half-shouts as he stumbles. _“I’m not— letting it get outside! All of you— all of you, go on! Get out!”_

Gerard is powerless to being hauled towards the exit, his lungs working with too little to let him think clearly. Time stutters. He registers the sound of peeling tape before someone undoes his mask from his face and the cold air shakes him awake enough to gasp for more of it.

An unearthly scream shakes night, the awful blend of wounded animal yowling and the screeching grind of machinery. The avalanche of crumbling walls echoes over the quiet riverside, the darkness disturbed by a red haze bleeding up through the tent and the streams of still light from their headlamps as they stare.

Seymour’s name leaves Gerard’s mouth in a delirious shout, his mic gone with his mask. His hand clamps down over his earpiece, desperate to squeeze a response out of it. 

Static.

He struggles to lurch forward, stopped by the hook of arms around his elbow, looping his narrow chest. His thrashing is short lived and ineffective, his limbs weak with the sore-sharp ache of falling and lack of oxygen. He slumps in someone’s grip — Arlo, from the voice telling him to take it easy — and finds himself being eased onto the grass next to Verity.

It strikes Gerard that he’s the helpless civilian, here.

It goes both ways. He hates being on the other end of it, but he has no choice. Time has run out and he’s dizzy and smoke is rising and he’s pretty sure Seymour just got himself killed to save all of them when it should have been _him_ and clutching onto Hector’s arm for dear life won’t tell him what to do next, he needs to do _something,_ Seymour is—

“There! Look there!”

Gerard whips his head around to pinpoint the voice, where they’re indicating. Facing forward, he sees it.

Seymour shambles out of the smoke, ripping at the tape around his mask. His headlamp is gone, broken sound coming through a damaged mic.

Jack and Rudy run to him when he collapses. They stagger together to where Gerard and the others are still laid out on the grass, lower him down to let him cough his lungs into correction. A stunned silence falls. Gerard stares at the flames, up at the churning sky, his head spinning with dying adrenaline.

Breathless, he turns to Seymour. “Your kids are gonna think you’re _so_ cool.”

For a moment, Seymour looks so starry-eyed that Gerard thinks he might finally cry. It quickly gives way into a big, earnest smile.

The minute their suits are off, Gerard is dragged into an embrace. For a long moment, he doesn’t know what to do but stand there. Eventually, he brings his hands up to return it, stumbling back with an awkward urge to give Seymour a thumbs up in stilted approval. As he turns around, another hand claps on his shoulder and draws him in, too. Then another, and another, until it dawns on him that in this moment, he is a part of this team, and they’re all glad that he made it out, too. That they went out of their way to see to it that he survived.

It’s strange to be so celebratory. Gerard has never been in a group of people so happy about accomplishing something, much less like this. It’s not like any of the concerts he’s been to. It’s more like they’ve just won some kind of life-defining battle and maybe they sort of have. 

Gerard can’t see the echotwist of sickness in the air anymore, doesn’t taste it in the back of his throat. Just fading smoke. Its own danger, yes, but not theirs to fight. Seymour’s brother spent his evening at the firehouse in anticipation for the call.

Gerard doesn’t let himself waver until the light of sirens mingles with the glow of flames, and Kendra loops an arm around his waist to walk him to the back of an ambulance. He sits on the edge with an oxygen mask until his heart rate slows back down to a dubiously human pace, the haze of adrenaline fades from his head. He manages not to pass out. His ankle is sprained, his hip as bruised as his ribs from the first hard landing, but he can set a subluxed wrist without help.

No one is seriously hurt. They got through it. They wouldn’t have if there weren’t so many of them working together, which Gerard finds appropriately ironic.

“Let me take you out for lunch this week,” Seymour tells him. “When you’re in better shape. You should meet my girls, they’d like you. Plus, I… don’t think they’ll believe me about this without some backup.”

Gerard glances around. “I don’t usually stick around long after this sort of thing.”

Seymour’s smile is tired. “You really do this that often, then?”

“Often enough.”

That must have been the wrong answer. Seymour looks sad, almost, for a second.

“Just lunch,” he repeats. “I feel I owe you _something_ for all your help.”

Gerard shakes his head. “You killed the thing.”

“You knew what needed to be done. We might never have pulled together if you hadn’t come snooping by the fence.”

A snort. “Thought you said I _didn’t_ look like some punk kid sneaking around.”

Wider grin. “You should get to be that, for a little while. Then you can go back to being a hero, or whatever it is you do.” Seymour props his hands on his hips, looks over at the tent. “If I come across anything like this again, will I still be able to reach you from that number?”

Gerard cracks his knuckles, idle, and nods. “Yeah. I don’t use throwaways so much anymore. Besides, I still have yours.”

A contact in the ECDC will be useful. A contact that’s just his, not one he found through his mother, who might call _him_ with questions and news and sightings. 

Gerard thinks he could stand to widen his network.

━━━━━━━━━▲━━━━━━━━━

On the television in the corner of the diner, a news anchor reports that the two sick girls are making a fast recovery, and should be released within the week. There are reports of a chemical fire by the riverside. An accident, no witnesses.

Seymour’s eldest daughter has his eyes, the younger his dimpled grin. They haven’t touched their forks or orange juice since Gerard eased into the conversation with his part of the story. Seymour tells the rest bashfully, as if he hadn’t been the heart of it. 

A cool breeze comes through as an elderly man holds the door for his wife. Tall stalks of lavender sway gently in their pot by the hostess stand, the clean scent drifting peacefully around the room.

Gerard takes a deep breath. For the moment, he’s not quite so heavy.

━━━━━━━━━▲━━━━━━━━━

**Author's Note:**

> give gerry friends! give gerry allies! give gerry a pack of dads! FUCK aspen clones! and kiss tazia!!!!
> 
> speaking of tazia, [i made some picrews of her here](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/628105753240207360/)! and [kate @gay-constellation drew her, too](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/628268912822337536)! WOW! 
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as usual, and stay tuned for _pharos by right!_ you'll be seeing more of tazia there, for sure. consider this [GerryTitan lore](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14KlgPfOb16ocGj8k0QrElw6UY0SqoNeH2yTj_zQ31bA/edit?usp=sharing) across the board!
> 
> let me know in the comments how you feel about all these guys, i put a lot of love into them ;;
> 
>  **EDIT** : rook's art is here! [here's the first piece featuring tazia](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/629908941074300928/), and [the second comic featuring the ECDC squad](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/630076879248015360/)! i'm so blessed to have worked this out with such a talented artist, show them some love!


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